Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  That night, Reeve’s fourth on the glacier, the temperature dropped to 27°F, but a dense fog rolled in. Bob and Brad hiked with their shovel down the makeshift runway, filling holes in the slush, planting gas cans as markers.

  The men were up at 3:45 A.M., assessing the conditions. (At 61 degrees north latitude in June, it grows no darker than dusk, and one can climb or work all night.) Fog still shrouded the glacier, but the temperature hovered a few degrees below freezing. Brad went to work over the camp stove. “We cooked all seven of our eggs in one final batch of delicious scrambled eggs,” he wrote later, “broke into a fresh package of bacon, had a grand compote of peaches and pears…. My secret motive for such a large breakfast was to be well fortified to dig the plane out of another hole should it go in.”

  Around 6:00 A.M., Reeve started the Fairchild’s engine to warm it up. The men returned to camp and waited, while, slowly, patches of blue sky began to puncture the fog. Just after 8:00, they hurried back to the plane.

  Reeve had determined to make a last-ditch effort. Now he threw out of the cabin every scrap of gear he could, to lighten the plane—tools, emergency sleeping bag, first-aid equipment, survival food, even the crank for the engine. At the last minute, to Bob and Brad’s amazement, he took a ball-peen hammer and started pounding away at the propeller. To the master tinkerer, a sharper-pitched prop would bite better in the thin air, assisting a shorter takeoff at the cost of aerial stability. At the last moment, Bob and Brad scraped the remnants of overnight frost off the plane’s wings and tail.

  Without so much as a wave good-bye, Reeve started down the glacier. Bob Bates recounts the next few moments: “He went bouncing down the runway. He hit a great block of snow and it bounced him off the left side, where the slope fell off quite steeply toward a meltwater lake on the glacier. Quick as he could, he turned the nose of the plane right for the lake, gave it everything he could. By the time he got to the lake, he had enough speed to get off, just missing the water. He kept going right toward a cliff on the side of the glacier.”

  Suddenly, the plane vanished beneath a dip in the glacier’s surface. Bob and Brad literally held their breath, anticipating the sound of a crash. As Brad later recorded in his diary, “All of a sudden, a few seconds later, the plane came into sight…. It was going like fury, but this time she was steady, her right wing lower than her left.” The plane climbed, then gathered speed down-valley.

  In 1957, Beth Day documented what the escape had felt like from the pilot’s seat: “I gave it the gun,” said Reeve, “and off I went. But, by God, I hadn’t gone a hundred feet when smack! down into a crevasse. But I wasn’t stopping…. I climbed right out of the crevasse and kept going. Then flop! down into another—and I lost the air speed I’d gained, getting out of it. Bumpety bump, it was just like driving over a plowed road. I realized I was getting nowhere. I’d already run a mile or more, and ahead of me I could see the big crevasses—wide enough to hold a boxcar. If I hit them, I was a goner. Then I happened to glance left, and spotted an icefall, shearing off the side—maybe 250 feet drop. It was my last chance. I made a sharp left turn and dove the plane right over that icefall…. The plane had achieved just enough speed on the jump-over to become airborne. I leveled out about ten feet from the bottom.

  “That was the greatest feeling of my life—bar none!”

  Later Reeve told Brad that when he arrived in Valdez, he “would gladly have thrown a lighted match into the fuel tank,” it was so empty.

  As the Fairchild dwindled in the distance, Brad and Bob screamed with relief and joy. Then they sat down in the snow, beside the boxes that for the moment held all their worldly possessions, and tried to catch their breath. The plane vanished behind Lucania’s western spur, and soon they could no longer hear its fading whine.

  An immemorial silence reclaimed the mountains. In that moment, the gravity of their situation came home to these best of friends. Brad and Bob were marooned in the heart of the Saint Elias Range, eighty miles by air from the nearest prospector at McCarthy, at least 120 miles by the route they would have to pursue to escape. No one else—not even the bravest pilot in the territory—could help them now. They were on their own.

  TWO FAST AND LIGHT

  IN some ways, it was an unlikely meeting. Bob Bates and Brad Washburn had gone through their freshman year at Harvard without bumping into each other. Now, at the beginning of their sophomore year, in September 1930, Bob lived in Dunster House, while Brad was lodged in Lowell House—only two blocks apart in the streets of Cambridge, but fairly distinct realms, socially speaking.

  Brad was already a minor celebrity within the highly competitive ranks of Harvard. Three years before, at the age of seventeen, he had published a book called Among the Alps with Bradford. One in a series, “Boys’ Books by Boys,” cooked up by the flamboyant publisher George P. Putnam, who would soon become the husband of Amelia Earhart, Brad’s slender account of his teenage climbs with famous guides out of Chamonix was so popular that it came out in a number of foreign editions, including one in Hungarian.

  Thanks to this renown, Bob recognized Brad by sight when he saw him crossing Harvard Yard, but he was far too modest a person to force an introduction. That task fell to Walt Everett, a climber who knew Brad through Lowell House and who had gone to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire with Bob. Washburn, who had gone off on his first Alaskan expedition the previous summer, was looking for candidates to staff future ventures. One day Everett said to Washburn, “Hey, I’ve got an interesting friend whom you would really enjoy. He lives over in Dunster House.” Everett proposed inviting Bates to dinner in Lowell House, but cautioned, “The guy has never climbed. He doesn’t know anything about climbing. I don’t know if he’s ever had snowshoes on. But he’s just a hell of a nice guy.”

  Inexperienced though he was, Bates shared with Washburn a love of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. That autumn of 1930, Everett, Bates, and Washburn made weekend excursions to the Presidential Range. Bates and Everett took turns riding in the rumble seat of Brad’s Model A Ford, which he had bought with his earnings from Among the Alps with Bradford. Brad had named the roadster Niobe, not out of some deep classical erudition, but because, driving to the Whites, the trio invariably passed through the center of Sandwich, New Hampshire, where a statue of the tragic figure from Greek mythology crowned the town hill. (Zeus turned Niobe to stone as punishment for boasting of the beauty of her children, whom Apollo and Artemis slew.)

  Brad decided that his new friend ought to join the Harvard Mountaineering Club. The only problem was, Bates was underqualified. Henry Hall, who had founded the club six years earlier, had stipulated that membership be granted only to alpinists who had climbed “three major glacier-hung peaks or their equivalent”—a requirement not coincidentally tailored to Hall’s favorite range, the Canadian Rockies. Though only in his early thirties, Hall had already become something of an éminence grise, and he was not about to loosen the rules just because Bob Bates was “a hell of a nice guy.” After much squabbling, Washburn managed to invent a special category of associate membership for the likes of Bates. Thus the man who would become one of the foremost American mountaineers of the century slipped, at nineteen, through the back door of an undergraduate club that was already in danger of becoming a bastion of climbing conservatism.

  The next fall, with his entrepreneurial flair, Brad persuaded the Forest Service to let the HMC build a cabin on Mount Washington, just below Tuckerman Ravine, which, in a time before chairlifts, was the favorite ski area in New England. The new Fire Trail, really little better than a broad hiking path, led past the proposed site. To haul building materials, Brad coaxed Niobe up the trail. “We had two big rolls of that horrible roofing paper,” Brad recalls, “each one of which weighed ninety pounds. Nobody wanted to carry the damned things, so we put them in the back of Niobe and drove right up the trail. Got within a quarter mile of the cabin site. The only way to get the car turned around was to back it into the wood
s; then everybody lifted it around. Everybody was yelling and screaming and drunk with beer. We just had a marvelous time.”

  As much as anything, the communal effort of building the cabin welded the students into a mountaineering brotherhood to be reckoned with. And there, in the White Mountains, Brad’s partnership with Bob was forged.

  Bob had grown up in Philadelphia, where he was born on January 14, 1911. His father was a professor of Greek and classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. An enthusiasm for things Roman and Hellenic rubbed off on the impressionable youngster. When Bob published his autobiographical memoir in 1994, he chose his title from a little-known inscription. In 1558, a Swiss adventurer had climbed an easy peak in the Alps, only to find that some predecessor had carved in Greek on the summit rock a motto that translated as “The love of mountains is best.”

  Bob claimed he was first imbued with this feeling at the age of five, when his family hiked to the top of Flying Mountain, which towers a lordly 284 feet above sea level on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. The small boy was entranced by granite ledges, ripe blueberries, the smell of the sea breeze mixed with the scent of fern and spruce.

  Four years later, Bob nearly died in the great influenza epidemic of 1919. The passage in his memoir detailing his escape from that untimely end bespeaks the character that would carry him toward Lucania eighteen years later:

  I became very ill and would not eat. Apparently, I was considered unlikely to survive until one evening my brother came to my bedroom with a piece of chicken from the dinner table and ordered me to eat it. I did, and from then on I improved. I have rarely been ill since.

  The Bateses spent several summers in a rented cabin on Randolph Hill in New Hampshire, which looked across a valley toward Mounts Adams and Madison, two of the highest summits in the Presidential Range. Bob spent every day in the woods, conducting wood-chip races in a nearby brook, exploring trails fraught (or so he thought) with the possibility of running into bears. His most vivid memory of those youthful days in the White Mountains comes from the first night he was allowed to sleep in a mountain hut, on Madison. In the middle of the night, Bob was awakened by terrible screams.

  A German professor, or a professor who taught German, I never knew which, had gone to the outhouse in the dark, where he made contact with a porcupine who was chewing the seat. Whether the professor actually sat on the porcupine we were never sure, but I always speculated that he had.

  Two cardinal encounters during his childhood promised to deepen Bates’s fascination with mountains. He came across a classic mountaineering book, Scrambles Amongst the Alps, by Edward Whymper. The climactic chapter in that book tells the canonic saga of the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, when Whymper saw his joy turn to ashes as, on the descent, four of his six teammates fell to their deaths. (Despite that tragedy, more climbers of Bates’s generation were nudged toward mountaineering by Whymper’s work than by all other climbing books combined.)

  The other encounter would also, in retrospect, have a monitory as well as an inspirational impact. In 1923, when Bob was twelve, he attended a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The speaker was George Leigh Mallory, unhappily touring the States as he tried to raise money for the 1924 Everest expedition. “Pretty dangerous, I thought, but exciting, too,” was the twelve-year-old’s reaction.

  A year later, the loss of Mallory and Irvine confirmed my impression of the dangers of climbing the world’s biggest mountains, but as succeeding years brought new expeditions, my father and I read about them eagerly. Of course, I had no thought of ever taking part in such efforts.

  During the summer between Exeter Academy and Harvard, Bob and a friend spent two weeks on a whirlwind driving tour of Maine and eastern Canada. They climbed Mount Katahdin, the most “serious” peak in the eastern United States, after a sleepless night during which a torrential rainstorm soaked them through their sleeping bags.

  Nonetheless, by the time he arrived at Harvard, Bates had done no real mountaineering. During his freshman year, when he decided to major in English, Bob buckled down to his studies as he had not in secondary school. In the summer of 1930, while Brad was off attempting a major unclimbed peak in Alaska, Bob and a classmate made an aimless and disappointing car-camping trip through the Midwest. The pretty girl whom Bob’s pal hoped to track down proved elusive, the road by which the vagabonds planned to circumnavigate Lake Superior turned out not to exist, and their Peerless automobile broke down with dismal regularity.

  When he was nineteen, then, it was by no means inevitable that the love of mountains would prove to be the central thread of Bob Bates’s life. The same cannot be said of Brad Washburn. Half a year older than his friend, Brad was born in Boston on June 7, 1910. His father was dean of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. An avid outdoorsman, Henry Bradford Washburn, Sr., took his two sons—Brad and Sherry (Sherwood), who was a year and a half younger—on frequent excursions to the White Mountains.

  At eleven, Brad made his first ascent of Mount Washington. Like Bates, Washburn was plagued with a youthful illness. “As a child, I suffered terribly from hay fever,” Brad told Anthony Decaneas in an interview in the late 1990s. “In 1921, when I first climbed Mount Washington, I realized that my hay fever disappeared at higher altitudes. Climbing and hiking became a relief from hay fever.”

  At fifteen, with Sherry and his father, Brad made his first winter ascent of New England’s highest mountain. So keen was his passion for the White Mountains that by the age of sixteen, he had written a guidebook, Trails and Peaks of the Presidential Range, which was privately published by Brad’s uncle. That same year, on his family’s first visit to the Alps, he reached the summits of three of its giants, Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, and the Matterhorn. The first two were strenuous “walk-ups,” but the last was still a significant climb, sixty-one years after Whymper’s disastrous first ascent.

  The next summer, during a two-month stay in Chamonix, Brad and Sherry hired the celebrated guides Alfred Couttet, Georges Charlet, and Antoine Ravanel and became true alpinists, learning their craft as seconds on the rope on such redoubtable granite spires as the Grands Charmoz and the Grépon. “Georges said that Sherry and I were the first clients he’d climbed with who were eager to be criticized,” Brad would recall seventy-three years later. “He said that most of his clients didn’t want to be told what to do. But we wanted to know if we did something wrong or stupid, so that we wouldn’t do it again. We wanted to climb better.”

  Sherry would never climb again after 1929—an ex-mountaineer at age seventeen! He would go on to a distinguished career at the University of California at Berkeley, becoming one of the top physical anthropologists in the world (well before it became the accepted view, he argued that the Piltdown man was a hoax). “Sherry was better on rock than I was,” Brad reminisces. “Georges used to say about him, ‘Il grimpe comme un chat’ [‘He climbs like a cat’].”

  Two years earlier, George P. Putnam had launched his “Boys’ Books by Boys” series with David Goes Voyaging—an account of a three-month journey in the Pacific with the naturalist William Beebe, written by Putnam’s own twelve-year-old son. Two further David books were followed by Deric in Mesa Verde and Deric with the Indians, penned by the then thirteen-year-old son of Jesse Nusbaum, the cranky superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park.

  It was only natural that, learning of Brad’s exploits from an article about his Matterhorn climb that Brad had contributed to Youth’s Companion magazine, Putnam would sign him up for a book. (Brad eventually wrote three, following up Among the Alps with Bradford with Bradford on Mount Washington and Bradford on Mount Fairweather, the last authored at age twenty, when he hardly qualified as a “boy”) Of the first book, Brad recalls, “I wrote it in ten days at the Pensione Calcina in Venice, on the way back from Europe. Turned in the manuscript to Putnam, as agreed, on the fifteenth of September, with a batch of pictures. The book was on sale by November, pictures interlea
ved in the right places in the text. Can you imagine a publisher doing that today?”

  Along with his passion for climbing, those teenage summers in the Alps inculcated in Washburn twin fascinations with flight and photography. Before he had caught more than a distant glimpse of the mountains, he flew in a small plane out of Lyon with his father one July day in 1926 on a sightseeing junket. That first tour of the Mont Blanc massif by air informs the rapturous first chapter of Among the Alps.

  As a Christmas present in 1925, Brad was given a Kodak Vest Pocket Autographic camera—ironically, the same model that disappeared with Mallory on Mount Everest. Brad’s mother gave him a crucial piece of advice. “She told me I should take pictures of people doing things—not just scenics,” says Washburn. The excellent photographs Putnam published in Among the Alps indeed show people doing things: Sherry in black beret jumping a crevasse, Brad seconding Charlet on the vertical rock of the famous Mummery Crack on the Grépon (camera evidently handed over to Sherry for the shot), five happy friends lounging on the boulders before the refuge of the Grands Mulets.

  While Bob Bates was attending Exeter Academy, Brad was enrolled in the Groton School in Massachusetts, another exclusive private secondary school. There, one day in 1926, the sixteen-year-old climber sat spellbound as Captain John Noel showed his photographs from the 1924 Everest expedition, recounting the experience of waiting in vain at Camp III for Mallory and Sandy Irvine to return, then, when all hope was gone, retreating in disarray to base camp on the Rongbuk Glacier, where the survivors built a memorial to their lost comrades. Noel’s lecture instilled in Brad a lifelong fascination with Everest, which came to fruition sixty-two years later, when he published the definitive map of the world’s highest mountain.

  Summers in Chamonix, Groton, his own Model A roadster … It sounds as though Brad was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. But as he went off to Harvard in the fall of 1929, the stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression. Washburn’s parents could not afford to pay the full Harvard tuition, so Brad put himself through school on bank loans, on the proceeds from his Putnam books, and by going on lecture tours, precociously passing himself off as a kind of junior Lowell Thomas, an eighteen-year-old authority on adventure.